The case of the “cannibal cop” is extreme, but it is a cautionary tale. The more conscious we are of consuming any particular fantasy, the less problematic it is. I don’t take the hard line of the biologist and professional atheist Richard Dawkins, who’s practically Maoist on the subject. He argues that reading fairy tales to children may dangerously “inculcate a view of the world which includes supernaturalism.” Rather, I think a different Oxford don, J.R.R. Tolkien, had it right in the lecture he gave just after he published The Hobbit. “Fantasy,” he said in 1939, talking about fantastical
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The extremes of fantasy...
